Re: They bought a stolen laptop.

Both moral and legal implications are different. Stealing something deprives the owner of the object being stolen. Unauthorized copying deprives the "manufacturer" (usually the author) of a work from one sale. But the original work still stands, and can in fact be legally copied even after the copyright infringement.

Re: $20 per bitcoin was the low???

Re: Non-scammable?

Yes, part of the problem with BitCoin is that some people buying into the whole BTC thing aren't able to differentiate between BTC as a currency and payment processing systems. BTC is NOT a payment processing network. It does have transactions, but they exist because it is the only way to trace the currency at all!!

For true online payments, anyone using BTC for payment should be using actual payment processors. Those would be able to initiate chargebacks if needed.

Actually

if you read the Reddit thread, the guy in the pic actually admits this is exactly what happened. They raced on ahead, then posed on the roadside. He's even got pics of the car in question as proof. Hehe...

Re: Typical

START PARSER

"Typical Left Wing"

FOX CONSERVATARD DETECTED

It's kinda awesome to see how the first three words in a given comment give away that it comes from a typical US Conservatard. I could probably set up a Bayesian filter to detect 'em, hell, even a simple filter like searching

Re: study goodness

Shit that passes as news is worse than no news at all, which is kind of the point of that study.

Only stupid people and rabid bible-thumping Conservatards actually believe Fox News actually says "teh truth". Murdoch is basically the 21st century Citizen Kane / Hearst. The kind of people that believe Fox News are the same that call Newsweek "Newsweak" because they don't believe in the retarded stupidity they do.

Hell. Maybe the problem isn't actually Fox News at all ... it is that there are people out there stupid/crazy enough to believe the stuff they put out!

SAN, not NAS

For something using Thunderbolt, I would think of a SAN instead of a NAS. Or simply attaching one of those big-ass 20TB 5-disk arrays with RAID5 support. Though these days I'd also think of using ZFS on the array; that way I can set up the array as a JBOD *and* have a very reliable FS on the attached stuff.

The other use? A plug-in acceleration card for your x-treme gaming needs.

Re: Bitcoin

I'm actually wondering if the effort of minting BitCoins is still far over the economical benefit of having those 25 BTCs given. At current trading rates, 25 BTC cashes in around $3450 USD. That's got to be enough to pay for a high-end CUDA-toting PC *and* the leccy bill. Maybe even two of 'em. Of course, this only holds if the price point holds...

Re: Not so much @mmeier

I do agree that current tablets are mostly "toy tablets" ... but I don't think MS is going to "save the day". In fact, the reason the whole Personal Computer industry has mostly stagnated is *because* of the Windows/Intel curbstomping in the desktop PC market. If the transportation industry were to match the computing hardware industry, we would all still be driving horse buggy, albeit with steroid-pumped, genetically engineered super-horses doing 100MPH down the motorway. But an internal combustion engine would still outrun the super horses, and the same applies to current x86 crap vs. RISC hardware. The reason we don't see RISC chips doing circles around x86 arch stuff is because nobody outside of ARM and SPARC are really investing in R&D on 'em. And yet, ARM is ever getting closer to x86.

Eventually Microsoft and Intel will fade away; what we don't know right now is who will take their place. Neither Google or Apple are better than them; ARM is good but still lacks the punch to really take over the hardware market.

Re: oh yes, people are dumping iPhones for Windows phones all day long. SURE they are.....

While dumping iPhones for Winblows Phones is iffy at best, the iPhone->Android migration does seem to ring true. Not all iPhone users are fanbois, and those who aren't might actually switch for many reasons.

Re: @Shane Kent

So I'm not alone!

Last year I decided to switch my DNS pointers from the hosting service I have (GoDaddy) to my own. Alas, I forgot that while ns2 had the "recursion disabled by default" setting, ns1 *didn't*.

2 weeks later, I check out my bandwidth usage and notice that it's waaay off chart. Monkeying with iptables, I was able to pinpoint the extra traffic to port 53. Firing up tcpdump gave me a zillion DNS requests for some weird domain, which itself was pointing to CloudFlare as well. Ouch! I outright blocked port 53, sending it to DROP. I even switched the DNS order ... but I did notice that ns2 didn't get the zillion requests. So I went on checking and finally found out about both the open recursion configuration, and the default config switch. Even after securing my ns1 BIND, I still had to leave port 53 blocked on my main DNS 'till the request flood died out. It cost me a lot in bandwidth that month, but lesson learned...

Re: Azure now has a dozen users, up from 6 two years ago!

"I wouldn't mind having a revenue growing 3x."

Neither would I.

But the coffee shop that went bust across the street last year? They were able to have their revenue grow up 10x. That didn't save their business go titsup, as their "revenue" was pretty much chump change. The given value for "x" matters a lot.

joke's on you

"Three percent of WPhone? Wow - double the share Linux has on the desktop. So 2013 will be the year of WP8!"

What makes this attempt at humor actually funny is that MS has been *claiming* every year since WP7's release the "year that WinPhone will take over the world", yet remain irrelevant.

Modern/TIFKAM Metro sucks donkey balls and exactly zero organizations have taken in that flying dung. In fact, our clients (big organizations, financial sector) actually *stopped* buying new PCs, or added a mandatory requirement for any new PC to have Win7. Hell, some of them are still in the process of jumping from XP to Win7!

Yes, we've tried Win8. The last dude that was still defending Win8 gave up last month, reformatted his laptop and went back to Win7. I have yet to see someone in the real world actually like the Win8 stuff.

@mmeier

"PS3 was neither powerful nor low power so the game box was rarely used as a NAS - cheaper maschines for that around"

PS3 *is* powerful thanks to the CellBE processor, and people actually using the OtherOS feature, like me, were actually monkeying around with the special features of said processor. Of course, most of those who dabbled with Linux on the PS3 were trying to run it as a regular NAS/Desktop box, which sucks given the low RAM specs on the box. But removing features like that is pretty much frowned upon. My original phat PS3 is still on 3.15 FW, I ended up buying another PS3 to play more recent games and have PSN access.

The irony is that Sony's boneheaded decision didn't hit the "nonmarket" ... it hit the crossover market of dudes like me who actually play games *and* tinker around with Linux. That made it a FAIL, which morphed into an EPIC FAIL as it energized enough crypto-geeks to crack the box.

Re: Wah Wah Wah

Actually, the MS shilltards are far more annoying than anything Eadon posts (or any of his alleged sock puppets). Proof of the AC shilltards being, well, retarded is the whole comment section for the article on Samsung's firmware doo-doo where booting Linux would brick a Sammy laptop. All of them saying "that's what happens to freetards".

Then someone made a PoC app that bricks the same laptop model from Windows, and the AC's go either quiet, or say "Will Eadon apologize now?"...

You're reading it wrong

"No, it's actually a REQUIREMENT for Microsoft Windows 8 certification that you can disable Secure Boot."

Actually, it's a REQUIREMENT for Windows on ARM certification that you *CAN'T* disable Secure Boot. On PCs, they hastily added "user should be able to disable Secure Boot" after word got out of the Linux-disabling feature, and even then that was because MS knows they can't pull that off on x86 hardware without getting antitrust lawsuits in their face.

Re: As is said in church...

Actually, Secure Boot is a useful thing ... *when it is user-manageable*. The MS way of doing Secure Boot is locking the stupid thing with an MS provided master key, so only MS signed stuff will work. A truly secure system would have me being able to add my own master keys, or those from Fedora, Ubuntu, whatever.

Most if not all PKI systems have this ability, so should all "Secure Boot" systems have it.

@t.est, you forgot Spanish

Spanish Spanish (that is, the variety used in Spain vs. the zillion variants in Latin America) is incredibly anal on language paranoia. They go as far as fudging words just to make them "fit" (such as "whiskey" becoming the eye-watering "güisqui") or try to put out some lame invention to "replace" the real word, like "sorting machine (ordenador)" instead of "computadora (computer)" or "balompié" instead of "fútbol (football)".

Other "minor" offenses are fudging spelling, with "cuásar" instead of quasar, but a lot of these are less intrusive than the previous examples.

It depends, though.

I care more of actual achieved speed as well, but something I do hate is to be lied. Three is being really good at going out and stating that HSPA+ is 3G. Meanwhile, a couple of operators are outright lying and saying that HSPA+ is "4G". Even worse when they end up charging the "4G" tax on HSPA+ capable devices...

Re: No suprises in any of that.

Agreed that PS3/Xbox is for proper gaming ... but PC is for even more proper gaming and hardcore gaming.

Thanks to Steam, most of my games library is back to 100% legal. And it isn't the only platform out there for PC gaming: Blizzard's own battle.net is necessary for the StarCraft games. Which I also own legally, even if my High School StarCraft days were fuelled by pirated SC.

Games are now easier to purchase on the PC/Mac scene, cheaper and given that I also have much more $$$ for discretionary purposes, the need to pirate is gone.

It's not just the iBone

*All* manufacturers have gone to the touch-only madness. Even Blackberry went out and put out the Z10; the Q10 was probably baked up when their market analysts told them "dude, your CURRENT BB users hate touchy stuff and want a keyboard!". Most of the current-gen smartphones (or those with worthy specs) are the keyboard-less junkers...

But they are anti-competitive...

Instead of sticking to the payment processing thing, they're doing a dick move on these intermediate processors. And they do it because they know that nobody's willing to put up a payment processing system as big as theirs.

Re: Hmmm

Lack of charging points...

"The real problem is that its most suited to city dwellers, who are exactly the sort of people who are unlikely to have a driveway or garage suitable for charging it. Currently, they are a 2nd car for the rich."

THIS is the main problem I've seen with EVs. My current apartment block lacks charging points in the parking lot, and I guess the same applies for most apartment block dwellers in large cities ... the very ones that would benefit from EVs.

By the way, Mexico City now has a car hire system since last year, and they do rent out both petrol and EV cars by the hour. This is how I finally got my hands on a Leaf, and I was actually surprised to find out that the Leaf's range will exceed by far my daily commute requirements. It did 75kms and it still had half the battery charge left. Given that my regular commute is around 20km, I'd easily get Monday-Friday covered with a single charge. Mighty appealing, though I'll probably stay with the car hire system.

Re: Can anyone explain the railways to me?

Except for the original SimCity, you had to put railway stations for people to use 'em. And even then, the 3 tile max distance rule applied as well. Basically, make the railways link Residential, Commercial and Industrial areas and the railways would get usage.

Re: In other news

hehehe. The one I use has two modes of operation: the main one where you stick your finger and it will grant access directly, showing your employee number, or the second one where you first input your employee number, *then* stick your finger. The first mode will sometimes go "timeout", while the second method will rarely fail. Maybe biometrics take too much time to match against the database?

Oh wait, I've also had "matching error" even with my emp ID. More like scanners suck....

A series of apps

Actually, "the internet" *is* a series of apps. We got our chuckles back in '98 when a teacher told to his class that the lab computers now had "the internet" blocked. Netscape now was password-protected. We got a great laugh, and then proceeded to telnet off to our favorite MUD. Of course, we wouldn't correct our teacher's idea of "the intertubes" as this misdirection would mean he wouldn't prod on our MUD/BBS stuff.

Interestingly, many of those "series of apps" are actually using the web anyway; Web Services are usually the interface used for many of them. So there's no love lost with the series of apps, and mobile devices are coping better with the native apps anyway. Hell, even Steve Jobs found out the hard way about that, remember the iPhone was originally devoid of native apps.

Hm, that explains it...

This guy seems to have been in the helm during the whole time that Sony started turning anti-consumer, and he's the first gaijin CEO.

Maybe the problem is precisely that? Japanese culture is usually better at the whole consumer's rights than the typical US company. Maybe having CEOship return to Japan might get Sony back on track, and off the stupid root kit/ban OtherOS path. Hopefully.